Most of us depend on the internet for our day-to-day activities – from buying shopping and booking train tickets to keeping in touch with friends and contacting our local council. Yet the world’s digital economy is being undermined by the activities of cybercriminals; the Office for National Statistics estimated that there were 2.46 million cyber incidents in the UK in 2015, making up more than a third of all crime. Southampton researchers are addressing this issue and training the cyber security experts of the future.

As one of the few GCHQ-accredited Academic Centres of Excellence for Cyber Security in the UK, the University of Southampton has a leading role in research and education to tackle cybercrime, both today and in the future. The Southampton Cyber Security Academy is a partnership between the University of Southampton and world-leading industry and government partners to provide a focal point for cyber security research, education and outreach. Industrial partners of the Academy are the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), Northrop Grumman and Roke Manor Research, with further partners across a range of industries set to join as the Academy grows into a vibrant community of businesses, centred in the South of England but with global influence.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone, Director of the Academy at Southampton and Head of ECS' Cyber Security research group, says: “The increasingly alarming statistics on cyberattacks and crime on a variety of targets make the Academy a timely initiative fully aligned with the UK’s national cyber security strategy. The span of problems is huge, including the protection of critical infrastructures, of industrial and economic processes, of government, businesses and users’ data, privacy and interests. There is a pressing demand for cyber security, and in the next 20 years cyber research will have the same kind of momentous social and economic impact as medical research had in the 20th century.”